‘We just can’t give any more’

A striking Unite member at York Hospital spoke to the Socialist

For as long as anyone within our department can remember, senior management have talked about moving the microbiology laboratory in Scarborough to York. Raac concrete was found in the roof at Scarborough and this sped up the closure. 

When the lab closed in October, there was no plan for how the on-call and urgent sample service for microbiology in Scarborough would be managed.

York staff were promised that 20 staff members would move to York. We got two medical lab assistants (MLAs), and two full-time and two part-time biomedical scientists (BMSs), one of whom has never been provided with training so can’t actually work within the laboratory! 

York’s workload has doubled and we have lost a large number of trained team members. Recruitment is underway, but we don’t have enough fully trained staff left at any grade to provide training quickly and without skimping, leaving partially trained people to work alone. It takes a minimum of 12 months to get someone ready for on-call work if all training is in place.

The BMS team has been running an on-call service that should have 16 people with eight, and are dangerously exhausted. Meanwhile, management gave the MLA team less than one week’s notice that they would begin working extended days, and there were insufficient staff to man the roster at a sensible frequency. None of the MLA team have fully completed their training.

Shifts have been covered by volunteers on goodwill for the last three years, but the goodwill has run dry as the team is exhausted and there is no end in sight. We have serious concerns about patient safety – an exhausted team will begin to make errors as they rush through work to try and keep the service afloat.

Scarborough microbiology is currently being run by three scientists. This should never have continued for more than a few weeks. Scarborough blood sciences teams are being asked to learn how to process and report microbiology samples, outside of their usual scope of practice. No additional staffing has been provided to support this, and training has still not been completed a year after the Scarborough lab closed. 

The microbiology service is being led from one crisis to the next. It’s all a huge mess. Staff are upset, exhausted and have no trust in the senior management team. The staff just can’t give any more.

• Strike action has taken place on 30 September, 7 and 11 October